On the meaning of life…
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
~ Alan Watts
“Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.”
~Alan Watts
“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear”.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard
“Having no destination, I am never lost.”
~ Ikkyu
Are you truly living life or simply existing?
Does life have intrinsic meaning?
When do we ask about the meaning of life? Typically, when something is going wrong or when something really difficult has happened. We ask it when someone we love dies, we ask it when we lose our belief in God, we ask it when we are unhappy, we ask it when we are unfulfilled. We ask it when we are lonely, we ask it when we are tired, we ask it when somehow we are out of sync with the world.
And that is what Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out when he said that the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
The question of the meaning of life does not arise when we are living life at its best. That is the answer to the question of the meaning of life―live life, and live it to its fullest, whatever that means to you.
“Isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
The question of the meaning of life is not to be answered with philosophizing but with living; the problem is to be solved not by creating a new theory but by creating a new life.
The ultimate end of life, consists not in doing, creating, or destroying but simply in the enjoyment of being.
“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, proposition 6.4311
Live a self-fulfilling life and the question of the meaning of life vanishes.
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consist of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
~ Albert Camus
Meaning is fundamentally a concept derived from human minds, therefore meaning can only come from a human.
It is intrinsic to meaning that it can't apply to anything without a mind to make it.
This does not imply that we are doomed to live in a meaningless universe…it's that we get the chance to experience ourselves and the universe we share.
This means that life is a blank canvas for us to create our own meaning.
Most humans outsource the meaning of life to external sources, using someone else’s creation, instead of accepting the daunting challenge of creating their own.
This path leads to conformity rather than individualism…the safe choice for most folks.
“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.”
~ Schopenhauer
“He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.”
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
True heroism lies in finding meaning in the mundane.
Find purpose and fulfillment in the ordinary recognizing the courage it takes to confront and conquer the challenges of everyday existence.
Perhaps it is in the face of adversity and the monotony of daily routines that our true character is tested and revealed.
Add Notes on Autotelic?
Life is autotelic…derived from two Greek words: auto, meaning ‘self’ and telic, meaning ‘goal’.
An autotelic experience is not to achieve things, specific end results, awards or recognition. It is done for the sheer enjoyment of doing it. The goal isn’t the destination, it’s the journey…which is its own reward.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced!
Most think of life by analogy with a journey or a pilgrimage, which has a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead.
This misses the point that the whole way along, it is a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
“Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us, unplayed.”
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Play your music.
Life is a dance. When dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere, the meaning and purpose of dancing is the simply dance.
Dance your dance.
The goal of life, like music or dancing, is not to get to the end, the point is to enjoy the process. You don’t dance or ‘pick & grin’ to get somewhere.
The process of life as an essentially musical process which has no meaning except itself. It is going ’round in circles like we love to spin in circles when we’re dancing, like children love to spin around in circles ’till they get dizzy. That’s fun. And so the articulation of wonderful patterns is the meaning of life, making sense of a world that has no discernible sense.
If we’re capable of finding enjoyment in each moment we don’t have to search for or chase after happiness.
It’s already there!
What we do is then no longer a means of achieving happiness, but an expression of our happiness.
Things are important to us at a human scale but we simply do not matter to the cosmos. Organic life, good and evil, love and hate and all such attributes to a negligible and temporary race called mankind are completely irrelevant. Humanity is immensely insignificant on the incomprehensible scale of the infinite universe.
Even the deeper, more profound aspects of human life itself are ineffable, hence remain, ultimately, untranslatable between ourselves. That's the entire reason art, music, poetry, mythos, religion and even perhaps dreams exist…as a means of metaphorically relating these concepts which are inaccessible to our rational thinking.
Either way, Carl Jung was correct when he pronounced that "Man cannot stand a meaningless life."
The happiest people are those that accept life’s struggles, despite the absurd fact that what we are searching for doesn’t exist.
Don’t search for transcendent meaning, find meaning in the struggle…like Sisyphus.
Life is not about finding meaning but being content or even happy that it has no meaning.
If there is no absolute meaning of life then the meaning of life is whatever we ascribe to it, we must forge meaning for ourselves.
“What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herin lies the key to your Earthly pursuits.”
~Carl Jung
“The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
~ Albert Camus
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
~ Richard Feynman
If we cannot find meaning to life, we must bring our own meaning to it or we bring an end to it….metaphorically or literally.
The journey is the destination.
Do you have cojones...are you brave enough to write your own story?
It is all a matter or perspective….
Perhaps, paradoxically, everything is meaningless, and because of that everything is completely and deeply meaningful.
“This - is now my way: where is yours? Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For ‘the’ way - does not exist!”
~Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.
"Why aren’t you fishing?" asked the industrialist.
"Because I've caught enough fish for the day."
"Why don't you catch some more?"
"What would I do with them?"
"Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats, then you could be rich like me."
"What would I do then?"
"Then you could sit back and enjoy life."
"What do you think I'm doing now?"
You have two selves inside of you, acknowledge them and learn to differentiate them. One is your Ego, which is attached to your body, your thoughts as well as your emotions. You act out of your Ego most of the time in your life living inside of your head and imagination rather than in the real life. The other side is your Higher Self, which is unconditional love and fulfillment at all times. It has no desires, no needs, and no goals to reach in this life because it already has accomplished it all. The following rules will help you connect with your Higher Self to live a happy, stress-free, and fulfilling life. The goal is not to eliminate your “bad” Ego because you can never as long as you live, but to control it and switch between your two selves whenever you want.
(Most important)Live in the present moment by not letting your thoughts control you, because the moment you think of something, you are not in the present moment anymore, but instead either in the past or future and stuck inside of your head.
Learn to control your emotions. Understand that you are always in control of them and can change how you feel. Never let any emotional insult trigger you and keep in balance. Side note, the emotion of boredom will eventually fade away slowly by following the rules and at some point go away completely.
Understand that you don't have to reach anything in life other than existing and surviving to be happy like any other living creature. Anything that comes on top of this is just an added bonus. You already have reached everything in life inside of you, you just have to understand it by going inside.
Stop comparing yourself to others and eliminate all illusionary social goals others have set up for you. What helps is getting rid of most social media.
Your own health should be the most important thing in your life, so work out and meditate. No excuse here, you should always find time for yourself.
Stop caring about what others think of you, the moment you do that is the moment you become yourself.
Patience is the key to living a stress-free life. Don't let time control you, instead go with the natural flow of life where time does not exist.
You can chase money but learn to keep it. Always ask yourself if you really want to buy the thing you intended to do because you actually don't need much more than your basic survival needs, refer to rule 2.
Your Ego will always fight you not to follow them because it goes against its foundation and beliefs, it will always try to pull you back into its stressful state at all times.
Learn to master the above rules and you will master your entire life.
Quiet your ego and mind to experience your soul…the divine essence.
Some folks measure success with career progression, some measure success with comfort and happiness. Neither is right or wrong.
“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that – in the long run, I say – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
~ Viktor Frankl
“We are like actors in a play. The divine will has assigned us our roles in life without consulting us. Some of us will act in a short drama, others in a long one. We might be assigned the part of a poor person, a cripple, a distinguished celebrity or public leader, or an ordinary private citizen. Although we can't control which roles are assigned to us, it must be our business to act our given role as best as we possibly can and to refrain from complaining about it. Wherever you find yourself and in whatever circumstances, give an impeccable performance.”
~ Epictetus
The implication of this is not so much that the question ‘What’s the purpose of life?’ is meaningless, but that to ask it is inadvisable in a practical sense. On this argument, purpose, meaning, and happiness are by-products of life, and are not gained through being targeted.
A man who drops his job to walk the world. Is he deciding to become a homeless vagabond or a traveler? Explorer? Adventurer?
It's all perception. Don't take anyone's opinion over your own when it comes down to measuring your own progress in any aspects of life.
"Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to consume the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinions. What good comes from that? There is only one way, and that is your way. You seek the path? Then I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way."
~ Carl Jung
Searching for ‘the’ meaning of life, a universal meaning for all is a fruitless endeavor.
There is no universal, ‘one size fits all’ answer. You must find, discover and create it yourself.
All the answers of How to, or When , or Why are there within you, all you need is self reflection. That’s all it takes. Learn to trust yourself.
“Where your fear is, there is your task.”
~ Carl Jung
Whatever the obstacle might be, you know how to overcome it, go with your gut and don’t criticize yourself too much if you go wrong. Learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat the failure. Rest will follow. That’s how everything works. All questions emerge from the same place where the answers already exist.
It's a rare gift indeed to have a clear understanding of what you need to be fulfilled right now and to be able to give yourself what you need.
And in the future, that might change! Your priorities may shift, and that's ok, too.
You have the power to change your chosen meaning and start over at any point. That is true freedom.
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
~Nietzsche
Is there even a need for a purpose to life? Perhaps purpose is a man-made concept which ties all your time on Earth to the stress of having to fulfill some greater goal.
Nietzsche believed that not only was there no objective meaning to life, but he claimed that truth itself does not exist and therefore objective knowledge about anything, including the ‘meaning of life’ is an impossibility.
Instead, according to Nietzsche an individual is always confined to know the world through one’s own personal interpretation of it:
“The task of painting the picture of life, however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own – and nothing else is even possible.”
~ Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“Love what you do and do what you love.”
~ Ray Bradbury
“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you never thought they’d be.”
~ Joseph Campbell
“Rejoice! The purpose of life is joy. Rejoice at the sky, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees, animals, people. If this joy is disturbed it means that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. Find your mistake and correct it. Most often this joy is disturbed by money and ambition.”
~ Leo Tolstoy
With purpose comes passion and a clarity of one’s identity and place in the world.
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
~ Nietzsche
“As long as you think that what you are looking for is outside of yourself, it will never be enough.”
~ Ram Dass
"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you."
~ Carl Jung
Understand this: The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.
“Every day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”
~ Nietzsche
“The whole world is a freak show. When you’re born, you get a ticket. It’s a circus, a cavalcade of entertainment. You should have fun with it.”
~George Carlin
My meaning:
What is the meaning of life?
What is the meaning of music? To enjoy, to appreciate it, to dance, to relax? Same answer for life.
Do you stop listening to a symphony because you know it is going to end?
Life is not a competition. The only person I need to ‘be better than’ is yesterday’s self. To ‘be better than’ I was yesterday involves individuation. (where does virtue fall into this?)
Kierkegaard argued that the driving force of human existence is not about achieving certain earthly goals but to evolve from our perceived self to a more idealized, individuated version of ourselves.
We are all born whole but are increasingly fragmented as we gain a sense of “I”. As the ego-self grows, the separation between the conscious and the unconscious increases. As the ego becomes the sole source of identity in our life, we disregard the other half of our personality, the unconscious, resulting in one-sidedness and physics dissociation.
The goal is recover our original unity we had as infants, before developing the Ego, by the original self. To become like a child is not a regression but a recovery or unity between the conscious and unconscious.
Carl Jung believed that the first half of our formation is devoted to developing our ego, and the second half is about integrating our unconscious to our identity and, thus, thriving forward to wholeness, individuation.
Through the alchemical process of merging these back together via the process of individuation…a self reunion occurs. Integrating our inner child leads to a heightened state of consciousness. more in tune with your soul, an alignment of your Ego to the Self, the source of spiritual nourishment.
Self-realization of the unconscious (the majority of your soul), Individuation, the process of making unconscious forces conscious, becoming a whole person, a ceaseless appetite for learning, self-improvement and wisdom, to become as complete a human being as personal circumstances allow, including the incorporation/integration pf the shadow.
We should carefully investigate the aspects of ourselves that we might dislike or that might scare us to some degree. They are just as much a part of us, except they might have been suppressed because we ourselves or our environment might not have liked them.
Automatic writing, active imagination and meditation are all paths to explore in this endeavor.
Do not set any intentions, because they might limit you. It is important to embrace order and chaos because they are both equally a part of you.
Joseph Campbell observed that myths serve an important role as a bridge to the unconscious. Although myths are not true in the usual way in which the term is used, they are true in a different way. They can have an important function as a metaphor, thereby illustrating a much deeper truth, compared to what we are able to comprehend at first.
Carl Jung indicated this importance of myths as well, myths, like religions, and fairy tales for children, can be used to better understand unconscious events. This is the case because they symbolize events that cannot be consciously grasped. We need a symbol or metaphor in order to understand them.
“That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairy-tales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized consciousness, interpreted, and integrated.”
~ Jung, Aion
“I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’ Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss (modeled on Leibniz) and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.’ “
~ Voltaire, Candide
Man need only cultivate his nature to realize himself (individuate), but he does not naturally succeed and the vast majority of men never do realize themselves.
Remember:
Peer pressure is poison to individuation
Mass ‘herd’ morality (not self-imposed morality) inhibits individuation
Alchemy is a historical metaphor for individuation
Don’t sell yourself short by thinking you are only your body or your personality, no matter how intriguing and dramatic they may be. For behind them, there lies a more profound part of your true self. Call it ‘spiritual’ or call it ‘higher consciousness’… call it what you will, but… Call it!
One of the doorways to that higher self is through the cultivation of your intuitive wisdom. As you learn to listen to and trust your intuition, you will find a quiet place in the heart of your being that is wise and can guide your actions. One of the things it will remind you of is your interconnectedness to all things. And out of that appreciation will spontaneously arise compassion for those who suffer; for the earth, and for all living things.
When that happens, don’t be overwhelmed by the suffering you see, by the darkness that exists in the human condition. True, there is much of it. But so, too, is there much caring and compassion in the world. Mahatma Gandhi said, “What you do may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” It is important for yourself, as well as for the balances in the world. As you let your compassion guide you into action to help heal the earth and those who suffer, your very acts will feed your own compassionate heart and in so doing, open the inner gates to knowing your own highest self.
I promise you that plumbing the depths of your being is an unparalleled adventure. I wish you well on the journey.
In Love,
Ram Dass
“The organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down - it begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and finesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as a means toward a whole - one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, goal, aim or meaning.”
~ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
“Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self.”
~ Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
“We detect rather than invent our mission in life.”
~ Viktor Frankl
"What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure—as an automaton of “duty”? This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy."
~ Nietzsche, The Antichrist
“Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves.”
~ Nietzsche
The ‘great books’ can also aid us in a process of self-discovery. The importance of self-knowledge in a life-well lived has long been known, but it is notoriously difficult to attain. For along with our powers of self-deception, we often lack the words to describe and express the subtle and more profound contents of our mind. The great works of fiction can help remedy this situation, as the authors of these works are some of the most astute observers of human nature. Through their characters they depict depths of the human soul few are able to disclose, and thus, their words can be used to unravel the mysteries of our own mind.
“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus, it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. “
~ Viktor Frankl
There is no specific road to take or goal to make, you make up some kind of goal for yourself…or you don’t.
Certainty is an illusory goal.
While goals provide a sense of direction and a challenge, they can also limit the player of life.
Through humbling experiences, life seems to instruct us to be flexible and to loosen the demand for control and absolute answers.
Perhaps the journey itself is the goal.
Find peace in doing the ‘work’ towards the goal. As long as your goal is the result of the work, you will never want to do the work.
It is very difficult to understand (without falling into nihilism) that life is purposeless and especially that it is beautiful that it is purposeless.
If it is purposeful then the whole thing becomes absurd – then who will decide the purpose?
Life is not a business, it is a play, and a play has no purpose really, it is non purposeful, or you can say play is its own purpose, to play is enough.
Life is not reaching towards some goal, life itself is the goal.
It is not evolving towards some ultimate; it is this very moment, here and now, that is ultimate and eternal.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Maybe the path will be difficult, maybe it will turn narrow. Maybe I will have to abandon it. Maybe I will have to take a different path. I won't be disappointed about that. I know where I'm gonna end up. All paths lead to the same place.
"You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the grim reaper."
~ Robert Alton Harris
The purpose of life is an individual choice. Not choosing a purpose is itself, a choice.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
(what about the truth that consciousness exists?...still perspective?)
No fact is as foundational and undeniable as the reality of our own conscious minds.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
~ Nietzsche
You cannot find universal purpose because you are purpose and live within purpose.
Life is not a journey…there is no goal. Life is more like a dance. There is no end goal except to enjoy.
Looking for a meaning to life is like looking for wetness at the bottom of a pool.
Or like asking where the universe is.
Like an eye trying to see itself.
“We seem to be ourselves elements of this world in the same sense as are other things that we perceive.”
~Alfred North Whitehead
Thus, we can learn about reality by diving inward and analyzing our ourselves, our experience.
Lose yourself in the possibilities of your life, to continuously practice and enforce your freedom.
You are free to create your own meaning for your own life.
Your experiences…the good and bad, the joy and the suffering…are like a chisel or brush, and you sculptor/statue or the brush/painter and you start like as the block of marble/blank canvas. Your internal and external appearances shape/paint you one chip/stroke at a time at a time. Live life like a work or art.
Live your life as a great novel and you are the protagonist…novels we want to leave behind as worth living.
If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. Don’t be a pawn.
Perhaps the meaning of life is to live a life with meaning and it is up to you to find/define/uncover/create that meaning.
Be the writer of your biography, the painter of your own picture, the sculptor of your own life.
“What does your conscience say? You should become the person you are.”
~ Nietzsche, ‘The Gay Science’
“For a human, the meaning of life is just to be alive.
It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
~ Alan Watts
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
~ Joseph Campbell
Life is not a journey…life is a dance. There is no destination.
Assume you’re under surveillance and dance like nobody’s watching.
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
~ Nietzsche
“Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
~ Epictetus
"Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life"
~ Marcus Aurelius
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well."
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
Play the cards you are dealt.
Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.
You cannot change the cards you are dealt, just how you play the hand.
You don't know what cards other people hold…some are born with pocket aces.
It’s up you how you choose to play, safely or risky…pass, bet, fold or go for the pot.
It’s that simple.
Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect.
I measure success by my level of happiness…which is ultimately in my control.
"Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all."
~Richard Feynman
However, a life well lived is more than a life of pleasure and happiness. It involves, among other things, meaningful pursuits. And some forms of suffering, involving struggle and difficulty, are essential parts of achieving these higher goals, and for living a complete and fulfilling life.
The problem is that at a very deep level, the reaction of the human mind to pleasure isn't satisfaction, it's craving for more. And so, even if you create extremely pleasant worlds, people will just want more and more...like addiction to drugs, you need larger and larger doses of this pleasant mental experience just to feel okay….aka the Hedonic treadmill. We adapt painfully easily to the things in our lives.
It's the truth of the nature of the mind itself and the truth that all these experiences, feelings, and sensations are really just ephemeral vibrations, they have no deep meaning. And this is why they can't give you any lasting satisfaction. If you get, for a moment, some pleasant feeling, it immediately disappears, and you need to grasp the next. It never lasts. And this is the essential nature of all these experiences, feelings, and sensations.
Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.
~ Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
I am not what I think and feel. I am witnessing what I think and feel.
I think only once you begin to realize that you have a real chance of understanding yourself and being really satisfied. Because otherwise you just continue to think, "Oh, I'm missing this particular feeling, I'm missing this particular experience, this is why I'm not satisfied, if I only had it, then finally I'll be satisfied"…and there is no such thing. And that's a very hard lesson to learn.
If you really want to explore reality and you try to only explore the pleasant aspects, you are not really exploring reality, you're just running away from something.
The irony of the science of evolution is we’ve evolved to a point where we think our minds ought to work in a way they don’t. Humans have evolved through the ‘natural selection’ of fit traits. The only traits which are fit are ones that give us the ability to procreate successfully. And two traits which have most certainly never enhanced the ability to procreate are complacency and contentment.
Simply put, the process of evolution has designed us to be creatures who aren’t complacent or content. In fact, I’d argue they’re unfit traits. To attract the best, or most mates and to have your offspring grow to adulthood and themselves procreate, thus passing on your genes you want to never be satisfied.
When we lived in caves the guy and gal who had the best cave could thrive and raise the most kids. In the dark ages if you lived in a bigger hut, same thing. Better mate, more and safer kids. You’re not satisfied with your admittedly comfortable and easy life for the same reason someone living in ore-history with a cave they could safely raise 5 children in would steal the cave of someone else where they could raise 10; because that’s how you got here.
You’re twice as likely to be descended from the couple who took the 10 child cave than the less fit couple who were content with their 5 child cave and too complacent to go out and find one where they could raise more children.
This is simply how we are biologically designed. You are the evolved product of a process which favors traits that always make you discontent and filled with the desire for more.
So the hedonic treadmill is an evolutionary trait.
What is Life?
The infinite experiencing the finite.
There's one great universal consciousness/soul/being that underlies, or simply IS, all reality. Basically your classic pantheism/nonduality.
Our bodies + brains are "matter lenses" that focus and limit that great big nondual consciousness down into an individual, temporary human (or animal) consciousness that considers itself separate from the whole -- in the same way our bodies/DNA literally "focus" the swirling atoms and molecules of existence into coherent human forms.
“The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.”
“When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die.”
~ Joseph Campbell
“I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that it’s not the answer.”
~ Jim Carrey
Life is a gift. Enjoy it or give it back.
"The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer!"
~Nietzsche
“Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
~Hunter S. Thompson
To not understand another mans purpose does not make him confused.
Take it slow, go with the flow, ride with the tide and keep glide in your stride…all while enveloping yourself in what you love and letting it kill you…
To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives … A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.
“Life is too short to worry about little things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing, and don't let people bring you down. Study, think, create, and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.”
~ Richard Feynman
Life is too short to worry about things that don’t ultimately matter.
Have fun.
Fall in love.
Regret nothing, and don't let people bring you down.
Study, think, create, and grow.
Teach yourself and teach others.
We are all, as Ram Dass teaches, just walking each other home.
At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.
And never forget that there are two rules in life:
1) Never give out all the information.